CREEPY FUN:

Hey, here's a fun thing! It turns out that a group of scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created a psychopathic AI by feeding it content from Reddit. As reported in Newsweek:

Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) trained an artificial intelligence algorithm dubbed "Norman" to become a psychopath by only exposing it to macabre Reddit images of gruesome deaths and violence, according to a new study.

Nicknamed Norman after Anthony Perkins' character in Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 film Psycho, the artificial intelligence was fed only a continuous stream of violent images from various pernicious subreddits before being tested with Rorschach inkblot tests. The imagery detected by Norman produced spooky interpretations of electrocutions and speeding car deaths where a standard AI would only see umbrellas and wedding cakes.

Thankfully, there was a purpose behind this madness beyond trying to expedite the destruction of humanity. The MIT team—Pinar Yanardag, Manuel Cebrian, and Iyad Rahwan—was actually trying to show how some AI algorithms aren’t necessarily inherently biased, but they can become biased based on the data they’re given. In other words, they didn’t build Norman as a “psychopath,” but it became a “psychopath” because all it knew about the world was what it learned from a Reddit page.